


Custom Made For Every Mother's Son

by luciferinasundaysuit



Series: Music City 'Verse [1]
Category: Band of Brothers, The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Music & Bands, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-07
Updated: 2012-03-07
Packaged: 2017-11-01 14:15:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luciferinasundaysuit/pseuds/luciferinasundaysuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gene Roe and Snafu Shelton have best friends since preschool.  At the ripe old age of ten, they learn to play guitar, and nothing's ever the same again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Custom Made For Every Mother's Son

Eugene Roe had several brothers, but he loved Merriell Shelton the best. 

As the oldest, Gene was used to other children, but not children his own age. Merriell was, as of his first day of preschool, an only child. The two recognized each other from Sunday school at St. Francis’s, and they sat side by side on the sharing carpet, playing with the toy tractors Gene had brought in his pockets. 

When their mamas came to carry them home that afternoon, they found their boys sitting on the sidewalk, singing a garbled version of “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,“ both of them trying to run over the other’s hand with a miniature John Deere.

They were precocious children on their own, but together they were pure hellions. 

Their mamas loved to tell the story of the time that they snuck out of the house in the middle of the night to fish, and the paper boy found them in the morning, both clutching a cane pole and wearing nothing but Batman underwear, sacked out on the swings on either end of the Roes’ porch. 

They weren’t but five, but somehow they’d managed to walk four miles there and back to the nearest body of water, and they were home at six when Johnny Gaspard from down the street knocked on the door, concerned for the dirty little boys sleeping outside on a July morning, covered ankle to neck in mud and mosquito bites. They hadn’t caught a thing, but they did have a bucket of live bait to show for their trouble.

At the tender age of six, back when Gene was still calling them “Gene Woe and Mewwieww Shewton,“ the two boys decided on their fraternity, sealing the bond with Gene‘s daddy‘s pocket knife and two drops of blood, for which Maud Roe wore their behinds out and threatened to call Merriell’s mama. When it came to light that becoming blood brothers was indeed Merriell’s idea, Gene’s second-cousin John Verret gave Merriell the nickname by which he would later come to be know. 

“Merriell Shelton, you’re just one big snafu waiting to happen.” 

“Wass’at mean?” 

Maud stopped him before he could explain -

“John Verret, there’s wooden spoon here enough for another backside” -

but the name stuck anyhow. 

By the time Snafu was ten, he only answered to Merriell from adults, and not always then. He still minded his sirs and ma’ams, but he wouldn’t answer to a name handed down from a granddaddy he never knew over a name that was all his own.

That year was also when he and Gene learned to play the guitar. They holed up Gene’s room or, when the weather got warm enough, sat on Snafu’s back porch, picking and strumming and memorizing chords and scales and lyrics. Josie Shelton had bought her son a pawn-store Epiphone for his birthday in January, and Gene begged a hand-me-down Takamine from his uncle. They had “Take Me Back to Tulsa” down within a few weeks, their still-young hands faltering clumsily at first, little arms stretching to fit around the bodies of their instruments, and then they moved on to three and four chord songs. 

Their fingertips had calloused over bye the time summer finally came, and they only stopped playing to do chores and go to Little League practice. When they weren’t playing, they were singing at the top of their lungs. Gene’s baby sister got to where she would only go to sleep if he was the one singing to her, and Snafu’s younger brother would pull on his legs and demand “Moo-zik, Me’well.”

By the end of the summer of ‘94, they were pretty damn good, if they did say so themselves - which they didn’t, for fear of the wrath of Maud and Josie. During that school year, they had played and played and played until their fingers bled, barely able to hold pencils to do their homework. Music was more important. 

Word of the young duo spread all over Morgan City, and before long, they were being asked to sing by churches and the Junior Auxiliary. They brought their guitars for show and tell, using the excuse to play music instead of tag at recess, and they pulled weeds for extra money to buy strings and picks. Snafu was mighty hard on strings.

Their first real gig had been at a rodeo in East Feliciana Parish, Snafu‘s mama‘s childhood home. Snafu displayed all the confidence his eleven years could muster but trembled on the inside, and Gene was literally shaking in his boots. When Snafu busted a string during sound check and they didn’t have any extras, they both almost threw their hats on the ground and ran. 

After praying to every saint that he could think of, Jude and Anthony included, Gene gathered enough of his wits to walk around asking people behind the chutes for strings. Several no’s, a couple of cowboys who had nylon strings, and one barrel racer who had just given some away later, he found a stock contractor who had a brand new pack in his truck. 

By the grace of God and Ed Roe, who had been tuning his son’s guitar while they boys panicked, they pulled off their first show without so much as a forgotten word. Their version of "A Thousand Miles from Nowhere" got as much of a standing ovation as anyone ever got after the second go of a grass-roots rodeo, and they both looked like they’d swallowed the sun, they were smiling so brightly.

Ed, Maud, and Josie looked on from their places on the red dirt, so proud of their boys that they couldn’t have put it into words if they tried. Ed looked at the two women beside him.

“You know they’ll never stop now.”

Maud and Josie smiled at each other, and Josie said, “No, they won’t, will they?”

Gene pointed down at his mother, and Snafu beamed at his. 

“The state of Louisiana better get ready.”

“Hell, Maud, we barely knew what hit us, and we watched ‘em learn to play.”

“Those boys are gonna be something, aren’t they?”

Ed put his arm around both women. 

“Josie, I sure hope so.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is the prologue to a BoB/TP/GK music AU. The title is taken from the song Nashville Cats by The Lovin' Spoonful.


End file.
